Yemen's Anti-Houthi Camp: One Enemy, Many Divides

Yemen's array of anti-Houthi forces is bound together mainly by a single conviction: opposition to the Iran-backed rebels who control the country's north and have recently pushed along its Red Sea coastline. Beyond that, the groups fighting under the banner of Yemen's internationally recognized government are divided by geography, foreign patronage and competing visions for the country's future.

A month of intense fighting brought the Houthis their largest territorial gain in years. Anti-Houthi factions lost Mokha, a strategic Red Sea city, and islands in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait to the south. The advance ended a truce in place since 2022 that had calmed a devastating civil war.

Saudi Arabia is now attempting to weld the factions — thousands of fighters in all — into a more unified force. Their divisions, however, have raised doubts about whether they can halt an offensive that has left the rebels perched on one of the world's busiest waterways.

Adam Baron, a fellow at the Washington-based New America think tank, attributed the Houthis' rapid expansion less to any single military advantage than to their unified command and goals. "For the Houthis, that makes it so much easier to fight this battle: one coherent movement on one side, and a loosely linked umbrella group on the other," he said.

Saudi Arabia formed a coalition to fight the Houthis in 2015, a year after the rebels overran the capital, Sanaa, and much of the north, driving the government into the south. In the years that followed, an array of militias and armed groups arose in the south, ostensibly to back the government.

Rivalries grew between Saudi-backed factions and others backed by the United Arab Emirates as the two regional powers competed for control of the coalition and Yemen's coastal regions overlooking strategic shipping lanes. The factions repeatedly clashed. After Emirati-backed southern separatists intensified fighting last year, Saudi Arabia carried out airstrikes against a suspected Emirati weapons shipment to southern Yemen. In January, the UAE said it had pulled out of the war, ending support for factions on the ground.

With a single patron now, Saudi Arabia is trying to absorb under its command and funding structure factions that spent years operating with other loyalties. Some commanders have been reluctant to surrender autonomy and their own revenue sources.

A main faction is the National Resistance Forces, established in 2017 and long backed by the UAE. With an estimated 30,000 fighters, it has been considered one of the best-armed groups, according to the Washington-based Middle East Institute. It was the principal group holding Yemen's Red Sea coast, though not the only one.

The Giants Brigades also formed part of the command overseeing the coast. Once funded by the UAE, it broke with other Emirati allies last year and is now backed by the Saudis. Mistrust between the two groups runs deep. The National Resistance Forces is made up largely of northern Yemenis, led by a commander related to former autocrat Ali Abdullah Saleh, who died at the hands of the Houthis in 2017. The Giants Brigades is dominated by southern tribesmen who are mostly Salafis — followers of an ultraconservative movement within Sunni Islam — and who hold bitter memories of Saleh's rule.

Officials say leadership disputes and a lack of coordination between the factions were major factors in their defeat as the Houthis moved along the coast.

Saudi Arabia has also been trying to build an umbrella group called the National Shield. Established in January 2023, it reports to Rashad al-Alimi, the Saudi-based chairman of the Presidential Council, the leadership body of Yemen's internationally recognized government. The National Shield is dominated by Salafi fighters with close ties to Saudi Arabia and also includes tribal fighters, some absorbed from the previously UAE-backed separatists. Composed of three divisions with tens of thousands of fighters, it operates in the sprawling central province of Hadramawt and areas in southern and eastern Yemen, and controls Yemen's main land borders with Saudi Arabia and Oman. It is not yet trying to bring the National Resistance and Giants into its forces.

There is also an official Yemeni government military, weakened for years by the UAE, which saw it as too close to Yemen's branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islah party. Instead, the UAE built a network of other groups as proxies. Now army forces as well as Islah-connected armed groups are stationed in the oil-rich region of Marib, one of the current front lines with the Houthis.

For years, one of the strongest forces against the Houthis was the Southern Transitional Council, an umbrella group of armed factions that sought to restore southern Yemen as an independent country, as it was from 1967 to 1990. The UAE funded and armed the council, which fought the Houthis but also frequently clashed with the government based in the southern port city of Aden. The council's leadership was dismantled in January when the UAE quit Yemen. Its cause still has supporters, and earlier this month a group of them attacked a convoy of Yemeni defense minister Lt. Gen. Taher al-Aqili in the southern province of Dhale. The minister was unhurt.

Overall, the renewed fighting risks a full-scale return to the civil war that killed more than 150,000 people and forced millions from their homes. Already, nearly 130,000 people have been newly displaced and hundreds killed.